News:

This is a email-to-join service. If you want to join the forum, just email support at amuletsandarmor.com with the title "Join A&A Forum" and in a sentence or two, tell why you would like to join the forum.

I'm glad that you've enjoyed it. I'm working on another quest pack. Just resumed work on it over the weekend. It's going to take the player through a ghost town, a battle field, and ultimately end at a big castle on a cliff. I've gone through a lot of designs to get the castle just right, but oddly enough the movie Victor Frankenstein finally showed a castle layout that works great in these kinds of 2.5 D engines.

Also, here is a suggestion: It might be a good idea to track indirect damage from player and give experience for that as well. I have tested out the necromancer and apparently the summoned monsters do not give experience, which makes them almost useless early game as you cannot level up.

I am not sure about poison experience though, as it might be possible to abuse it by repeatedly poisoning monsters and running away from them, killing them without any trouble.

No, the summoned monster's attacks do not give XP, because I wanted to put together a system where players were rewarded for things other than combat. But you do get about 1,500 XP every time that you use the skill. I kind of like the way it balances the character, because using the blood letting skill to gain mana back, and then continue summoning, is a big risk for the character. So it adds this interesting risk/reward dynamic.

There are other factors to try to spread around XP for other activities. Like gaining XP for picking locks as a rogue. I've always planned on going back and finding a good system for neutral spells. The limiting factor is that a lot of neutral spells are very cheap, and there's going to be a tough balance between giving too much XP (so that blasting push before killing a monster is the best way to gain levels) and giving too little XP (so that spells like slow and dispell magic don't give enough of a reward for their usefulness). One thought was to make every utility spell still cause a tiny bit of damage so that those kinds of spells become a bit more useful and always give back some XP.

After some thought, I think that the idea of indirect damage is still a great idea for many spells. For example, pushing a monster off of a cliff. There's a rather ingenious way to do this that I remember from the old Action Quake II mod. Basically when you hit a monster with a push or pull effect, it could get an attacker value and a timeout of about a second. How this would work is that if the monster takes environment damage (such as falling damage) during that timeout the attacker that was recorded gets the XP. That would work if a monster was pushed into lava, pushed onto fire, pushed into a boulder.

While on the subject of indirect damage, Poison doesn't give XP in the original game and I think it was done really well. Poison weapons and poison spells are essentially the most powerful abilities in the game. For example, the poison bolt will grant some XP for the initial hit, but the periodic poison damage does not grant XP. But that periodic damage does a LOT of damage over time and it stacks. So a warlock's best strategy in a lot of fights is to blast a ton of poison, run away and charge up, then blast a bunch more. Same with a rogue and a poison dagger or the sickener. There are only a handful of serious threats that are immune to poison so this strategy can defeat danger, but it stunts XP. Which I think is a brilliant trade off.

As for the indirect XP from utility spells. I chewed over some options, and I think that there is a good middle ground without making a super abstract XP system. The XP award would have to be per spell type. Low level spells would give nothing or very small amounts. Most enchantments would give no XP because they are designed to make melee combat easier, and that carries with it its own XP reward. Spells like dispell magic and earthbind would give a reasonable amount.

The question for me at that point is whether stuff like fly, life water, and gaseous form should grant XP. They are not necessarily meant to help with combat, and they are relatively powerful spells. So it seems like they should have an award associated with them.

Just to keep in mind, pwmod has two major XP differences to the original game. The big one is that dying (after level 1) reduces your XP by a lot. The other is that since there are more sources of XP, and the base XP was increased for many activities, the players level marginally faster. So any of these improvements increases that margin slightly.

The limiting factor is that a lot of neutral spells are very cheap, and there's going to be a tough balance between giving too much XP (so that blasting push before killing a monster is the best way to gain levels) and giving too little XP (so that spells like slow and dispell magic don't give enough of a reward for their usefulness).

I slightly disagree with neutral spells being too easy to cast though. Unless you are playing one of the classes with good regeneration, it is not really possible to repeatedly cast spells to get experience.

I think poison should not give experience as well, as I stated in my previous post. I completely agree with your points - the tradeoff is easy combat versus experience, as you said.

Spells like Fly usually require lots of energy to cast, so there could be a small amount of experience gain I guess.

Some suggestions:You might want to reduce the amount of loot in the new quests. I feel I received too much good equipment too soon. Some stuff that I would get around Q4-Q5 was in the first quests if I remember correctly. (e.g. the mage runes)

Also I managed to kill the big monsters in that town invasion quest using poison hands and a standard dagger. Took more than 20 minutes as a low level mage, but I think their AI needs to be changed slightly, because they stop hitting you if you push them into a corner and keep beating them.

Slightly off-topic (question also for Lysie): What is the current decision regarding a higher resolution option? I remember that there were some work done on it around 2013, along with Lua integration.

Yes, it's possible to gain extra xp by killing the wolves, but I never really worked on that because every time I tried to abuse that, I got wrecked by the wolves. I'd only get away with a couple pot shots from time to time. I did sometimes get a little XP boost by accident when summoning a bunch of minions on a large monster, and blasting the group with the acid attack, however that's a giant MP drain. So it turned into a method to turn relatively expensive scrolls of mana into XP. It might be a super easy fix though. I'll have to double check it.

Strangely the wolves did not hit me back at all. I think I have "farmed" around 10-15 wolves. None of them did anything in return.

Another bug report would be the class descriptions for new classes in the new character creation screen, the one you see armor proficiencies and so on. There seems to be an issue with newlines, so the lines are concatenated somehow.

The class description and palette issues for new player photos is known. I put them off because I had planned on address both issues by helping the creators with a rewrite of the game some time ago, however I never had much luck. Always had problems with really low level graphics issues and file reading issues.

In the back of my mind, I'm looking at the .NET core libraries and wondering if there's a really quick path forward there for a cross platform solution.

If you already have the mod, remember to back up your save files before installing!

Changelog from 1.3.2:Quest 10 included in installerAdded silver weapon bonus for hitting through immunities. i.e. banshee can be harmed with silver weaponsRebalanced weapon vs monster bonuses to keep axe from being stronger than longswordsUpdated store item order based on finished quest numbersUpdated elemental damage bonuses to be more inuitive. i.e. lightning doesn't only add damage to plate armor monstersAdded XP for pushing monsters off cliffsLots of multiplayer fixes as discussed in other threads.

The majority of adding a new class comes from adding a new numbered .dat file and .bmp portrait in that classes folder, but there should still be some hooks in game that identify total number of classes and try to check which classname it is. I didn't intend to make adding them easily a feature. It was more about moving away from an array of classes that was hardcoded all over the source. Especially for features like picking locks.

The biggest challenge is really the custom skills. They have to be changed in code and there's lots of work in the source files for magic and rune placement. If this were to be a feature, there should definitely be some scripting to help out.

Putting in LUA hooks wouldn't be that hard, especially with the existing effort to port to LUA from a while ago.

It certainly looks like quite alot of work. Too bad I'm not particularly fluent in LUA or any other coding script. I was only able to make a modified class thanks to your templates, so thank you again for the hard work and effort you put into making these.